Commerce over networks; particularly e-commerce over the Internet, has increased significantly over the past few years. Part of e-commerce enables users/customers to access information of products and to purchase them from various commercial Web sites (i.e. online stores). There are numerous online stores currently operating in the Internet including: Amazon.com, etoys.com, Buy.com, Wal-Mart.com, LLBean.com, and Macys.com. These online stores provide various customer services to make commerce activities possible over Web sites. Some of the examples of the basic services are catalogs of merchandise which are both browsable and searchable by various product attributes (e.g., keyword, name, manufacturer, and model number), shopping carts, and checkout process. Some online stores also provide advanced customer services such as wish lists, gift registries, calendars, custom-configuration of products, buyer's groups, chatting, e-mail notification, and in-context sales.
Any Web site owner, any online merchant needs to know whether the Web site or online store effectively serves its intended purpose; that is, how many shoppers visit the Web site, who these shoppers are, what they want, and what they do at the store while they are there. The ability to analyze and understand traffic flow, the way shoppers navigate from page to page in a store, and the effectiveness of various components in an online store such as products, product pages, hyperlinks, Web design features, and customer services, is critical for successful product marketing and sales. Recommendations for improving the effectiveness of online store can be created and implemented based on the analysis results.